Advocates Of Concealed Campus Guns Say They Would Deter Rapes

By |February 19, 2015

The push to allow college students to carry concealed firearms never got much traction until it found an unlikely ally in the anti-sexual-assault movement, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Carrying a concealed firearm on a college campus is banned in 41 states, because of a law prohibiting it or university policy. Legislators in Florida, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming are pushing to turn campus-carry bills into law, hoping that it will cause a drop in the staggering number of sexual assaults that occur on campus.

Opponents of campus-carry bills say that if a gun is in the room, it will go off.College students could be particularly at risk for gun-related accidents due to recklessness and excessive drinking that are commonplace on many campuses. John Foubert, the National President of One in Four, a non-profit dedicated to rape prevention, think that the bill shows a misunderstanding of rape. “If you have a rape situation, usually it starts with some sort of consensual behavior, and by the time it switches to nonconsensual, it would be nearly impossible to run for a gun,” he told the New York Times.

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